Another deranged mental case went on a shooting spree in a Kansas City shopping center. This time, thanks to the presence of armed police, he was shot dead after killing only two people. It barely merited a mention in today's Inquirer, and the story doesn't reduce itself to easy stereotypes -- especially the "how did he get a gun" part. That's because the man was a fired security guard who had worked at Target (the target of his attack):

David Logsdon's life was a disaster. His mental health was fraying; his finances were a mess.

In September, anonymous neighborhood complaints led to codes enforcement violations for an overgrown lawn and a motor home in his drive. He ignored them.

In October, those violations led to $250 in fines and two warrants carrying $50 in fees. The warrants prompted police to suspend his license as a private security guard.

In November that cost him his job at Target.

On Sunday, the bleeding Logsdon limped through the mall, the rifle in his hands, dead and wounded in his wake. The Target store was ahead.

At one point he collapsed onto a coin-operated kiddie-car ride, possibly breaking the 20-round magazine on his rifle.

He didn't realize officers were approaching from the rear, or he didn't care. He never saw the officer who came through the Target store in front of him, or the shotgun.

The first blast brought him to his knees. The second killed him.

After a shooting incident in the news decades ago, I was meeting with a professor at UC Berkeley, who sighed and then sarcastically quipped, "I suppose the next thing that will happen is that I'll be shot for giving a student a C."

We had a good laugh. Because such things were considered funny then. It isn't funny now, because times have changed. It's entirely conceivable now that just as a high school teacher can get his neck broken for taking away an ipod, a professor might very well be shot for giving a student a C.

Obviously, this man was deranged, and the family tells the now-familiar tale of how they tried to get him help but couldn't:

From all that is known about the murderous spree at Ward Parkway mall, it would seem obvious that the gunman, David W. Logsdon, was deranged.

At a Monday news conference, his sister, Kathy Cagg, spoke of how her brother had a long history of mental illness combined with alcohol abuse. He had been hospitalized in October as suicidal, but only for six hours.

"I wish he had been given the help he truly needed," Cagg said in front of the church she attends, the First Church of the Nazarene at 118th Street and State Line Road.

Her situation goes to the heart of how difficult it can be for loved ones, friends, neighbors or co-workers to get help for people they suspect are mentally ill and potentially dangerous to others.

"There is no guarantee that they will be kept for 96 hours," said Jackson County Circuit Judge Kathleen Forsyth. "Doctors can let them out any time. Sadly, there is no guarantee they'll even let them in. Many times the hospital is full up."

Sometimes, she said, patients are let out in a matter of hours.

"The statutory situation is not the problem," Forsyth said. "The courts have no problem doing what needs to be done to commit people for evaluation. The issue is how much mental health treatment is available in the community. That's where the whole thing breaks down.

"There are so many people that need help. There is a logjam in the hospital."

Without an individual's cooperation it is nearly impossible to get a loved one mental health care they may desperately need. Friends, neighbors or family members can try to initiate a 96-hour commitment. It requires at least two people to swear out affidavits and present them in probate court.

Kansas has a similar procedure. In Kansas, beds for emergency commitments are more available.

"A lot of people enter the mental health system via concerned people," said Pete Zevenbergen, director of Wyandot Center for Community Behavioral Health.

But if one doesn't want help, it can be hard and dangerous.

"The whole issue is fundamentally a civil rights issue," said Susan Crain Lewis, president of the Mental Health Association of the Heartland. "This is America. If you are not hurting anyone, you have the right to be as odd or weird as you want. ... We allow people in America the freedom to make maybe poor, misinformed choices, unless they pose an imminent threat to themselves or others."

When that happens, the alternative is to call the police, if it isn't too late.

I have to say, I think Susan Crain Lewis's focus on "the right to be as odd or weird as you want" misses the point by blurring the distinction between eccentricity and mental illness. Part of the problem is the medicalization of nearly everything, and the notion that we are all mentally ill. Neuroses and borderline "illnesses" like "ADHD," "OCD," and "codependency" are indistinguishable from paranoid schizophrenia, and the message is that we should all just be taking our meds. How is a truly crazy and dangerous person to be distinguished from an odd or weird person?

And what about someone with a clearly unreasonable grudge or grievance which becomes an obsession? A normal student would not shoot a professor for giving a student a C, and a normal high school student wouldn't break his teacher's neck for taking away his ipod. But what is normal? I sometimes wonder whether there has been a quantum shift in the way people hold grudges, and take things as offenses to be avenged.

Not that this is new. America was once more of an "honor-based" culture in which dueling was the norm, and grudges were settled at gunpoint. I may be wrong, but I don't think a fired employee or a student given a low grade in the old days of "honor culture" would have seen these things as questions of honor to be settled with violence. More likely, they'd have thought that they were at fault. I mean, if you're a student, your grades are your responsibility, right? Where would anyone get the idea that it's the teacher's fault? By reinventing "honor" that went by the wayside? (Now that we are all honor students, where is true honor to be found?)

Resentment is a common enough feeling, but when it is coupled with mental illness and a sense of entitlement, it can be very dangerous. I've noticed that in day-to-day situations, even people who aren't crazy show a lot more resentment than they used to, and are perceiving personal attacks in the most innocuous situations, and I sometimes wonder if it's my imagination, or if there's been some sort of change in attitudes, but it seems that resentments are on the increase.

I'll give one teensy anecdotal example. If you order a drink and it's loaded with fruit flies, you send it back, right? Getting another one ought to be a simple matter, right? This happened to me, and the waiter took the fly-filled drink back to the bartender and set it down on the bar. Instead of just fixing another one, the bartender (a very young woman) became totally enraged, and stared at the drink and the flies -- as if its very contents were an accusation of wrongdoing. I had not noticed her before, but she damned well noticed me (I guess the waiter told her who sent the drink back), and she fixed me with a look of death. Had I been her boss, I'd have wanted to fire her on the spot. Whether that would have been a good idea, I guess, depends on whether she is mentally ill or has an angry, grudge-holding boyfriend.

Normally, such a trivial incident would be so silly as to not be worth mentioning.

But haven't people been killed for less?

(I guess I should be glad we're not yet a nation in which everyone is a mentally ill "honor student.")

UPDATE: Don't miss Clayton Cramer's post on this subject, along with this post on a deranged gunman who shot up a "gun free zone."

And via Glenn Reynolds, Bernard Harcourt (whose paper Cramer cited before) has carefully researched the deinstitutionalization/crime ratios. Glenn Reynolds also linked Harcourt's earlier post, in which the bottom line is this:

Aggregated institutionalization is the best predictor of homicide rates. In studying the prison today, we need to aggregate mental hospitalization and prison rates.

There is always common sense, though. People who are institutionalized are unable to commit crimes on the outside.